Those seeking to enter the rewarding world of Linux system administration can be scared off by the platform’s sometimes outright hostility towards the concept of “administrator friendliness”.

Linux – and the community that surrounds the open-source OS – can seem intimidating to the uninitiated, but it does not have to be so. To illustrate, I want to go over the single most common “why doesn’t it work” issue I encounter among junior admins: cloning CentOS virtual machines (VMs).

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced that its Linux Essentials program which measures foundational knowledge in Linux and Open Source Software has met the requirements of the K-12 Computer Science Standards of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA: http://www.csta.acm.org/). The CSTA has 41 chapters throughout North America and members in 126 countries worldwide.

Desktop

WiFi-only flavors of the Chromebook Pixel have only just started shipping, but if you’re already itching to install Linux on one of them, you’re in luck. Not only have kernel patches been submitted for the hardware, but Google’s Bill Richardson has now laid out exactly how to load up the devices with Linux Mint.

Applications

The latest release of NetworkManager, version 0.9.8, and its associated applet and VPN plugins now enable users to create Wi-Fi hotspots in access point mode with drivers and hardware that support this function. According to a list maintained by the Linux kernel’s wireless driver developers, many modern wireless chipsets by Atheros, Intel and Ralink include the needed functionality. The b43 and b43legacy drivers for older Broadcom chips apparently work as well.

There is no dearth for good quality music players in Ubuntu. Even the default Rhythmbox is pretty darn good. But how many of those music players can be considered as good-looking? It is a tricky question since looks are very subjective. Anyway, here’s a collection of 6 best music players for Linux which I think are among the most good looking alternatives out there.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

New distros come onto the scene on a fairly regular basis; SolusOS and Fuduntu Linux are two I’ve covered over the past few months, but recently another one caught my eye as being particularly worth covering.

Yesterday, I posted an article about Ubuntu is still not profitable. It was really a surprise to me because Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro and it has been around since 2004. And this makes me wonder that if even a big distro – backed up by a big company – like Ubuntu cannot become profitable, how the small distros are doing?

Last night I was browsing through my site states, and saw a link to a subreddit about distrohopping. I had no idea such a reddit existed, but I was delighted to find out that it did. One of Eye On Linux’s older columns was even listed in the top articles tab.

Currently, the distrohopping reddit has 515 readers. It might be a good idea to click the subscribe link, and see if we can help get that number up a bit. There’s some great threads to read there, and it’s always nice to connect with fellow distrohoppers.

New Releases

The SolusOS Team are pleased to announce the release of SolusOS Eveline 1.3. This is strictly a maintenance release, and includes base system adjustments and updates not present in the 1.2 release. This release is available in the following architectures: x86, x86 with PAE, amd64

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Canonical says that Ubuntu 13.10 will include “a complete entry-level smartphone experience” when it ships in October. Anyone brave enough to try out the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview, however, will quickly discover that the current incarnation of Ubuntu for phones and tablets offers considerably less than that.

Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical make a lot of noise about phones and tablets they’re not shipping and desktop interfaces that are liked by some and loathed by many. Not that my current favorite environment, GNOME 3, is the object of universal love (hint: it’s not).

Developers got their first hands-on peek yesterday of Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch OS for mobile phones, with the release of the first developer beta. So did I.

The good news: Ubuntu Touch is a more compelling mobile environment, even in the first developer version, than I expected. It borrows heavily from other mobile UIs, including BlackBerry 10, the iPad, Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone, yet manages to feel like its own OS. It’s much too soon to rate, but the OS is promising, for reasons I explain shortly.

2 days ago, Sean Micheal Kerner from internetnews.com published a short article about how Ubuntu is still not profitable. According to him, Mark Shuttleworh had admitted that Canonical was not cash flow positive in 2008. And nothing has changed since then.

“Fast forward to 2013 and during a call announcing Ubuntu for Tablets and Shuttleworth once again said that his company was still not profitable.

Phones

Ballnux

Samsung’s dual-SIM Galaxy S3 Duos – model number SCH-I939D – is now official in China. Featuring support for CDMA and GSM networks, the device is said to be virtually similar to regular Galaxy S3 versions sold internationally.

Android

The folks at security tools company Pwnie Express have built a tablet that can bash the heck out of corporate networks. Called the Pwn Pad, it’s a full-fledged hacking toolkit built atop Google’s Android operating system.

Pwnie Express will be selling the cool-looking hack machines — based on Google’s Nexus 7 tablets — for $795. They’ll be introduced at the RSA security conference in San Francisco next week, but Pwnie Express is also releasing the Pwn Pad source code, meaning that hackers can download the software and get it up and running on other types of Android phones and tablets.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Meet the Pwn Pad, a 7-inch tablet aimed at the professionals. Security tools company Pwnie Express has come up with its new tablet or rather a full-fledged hacking toolkit running Android 4.2 and Ubuntu 12.04.

The cool-looking device also features a OSS-Based Pentester Toolkit and Long Range Wireless Packet Injection. The company aims to sell the device at $795, a price tag that should turn many away except (perhaps) security pros willing to impress clients by showing how they can identify security issues with just a few taps on their brand-new tablet.

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

Google has released Chrome 25 to its Stable Channel. Chrome 25.0.1364.97 for Windows and Linux and Chrome 25.0.1364.99 for Mac OS X bring improvements to extension security, support for the JavaScript Web Speech API and fix 22 security vulnerabilities, five of which were fixed as part of Google’s bug bounty program for the browser; the rest were found by employees of the company.

Mozilla

Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross is leaving the company, he announced in a Facebook post yesterday afternoon.

For those of you who weren’t reading TechCrunch in 2007, Firefox co-founder Ross and Joe Hewitt came to Facebook through its acquisition of Parakey, a web OS that was still in stealth at the time. Parakey was Facebook’s first acquisition. Hewitt, who spearheaded many Facebook Mobile projects including iOS, left the company in 2011.

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Just a few days ago, LibreOffice 4 was released. As you know, this is an important milestone, both technically and historically. Since the split from OpenOffice, managed by Oracle, LibreOffice has quickly grown to become the dominant open-source office suite, and has completely pushed away OpenOffice from the spotlight. Moreover, this latest version brings a whole bunch of good things.

Business

Hortonworks’ Alan Gates has announced the Stinger Initiative, a four point plan for making Apache Hive 100 times faster. With other Hadoop distributors already having taken steps to speed up processing of large data volumes (e.g. MapR’s Drill), Hortonworks prefers to rely on existing tools and input from Hadoop’s large community.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

After burning an effigy of Free Software Foundation (FSF) president Richard Stallman, protesters in Massachusetts today burned down the building housing the headquarters of the FSF in response to rising frustration caused by the user interface of the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.

Swartz’s 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a “moral imperative” and advocated for “civil disobedience” against copyright laws pushed by corporations “blinded by greed” that led to the “privatization of knowledge.”

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive,” Swartz wrote in the manifesto. “We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.”

Today, the White House released a memorandum (PDF) in support of a more robust policy for public access to research, making the results of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research freely available online. The memorandum gives government agencies six months to detail plans to ensure the public can read and analyze both research and data, without charge. Both open access and open data are key to promoting innovation, government transparency, and scientific progress.

Programming

The Foundation has announced the Eclipse Long Term Support (LTS) initiative. With industrial uses of software which expect support and maintenance of the software stack from ten to fifty years, there has long been a desire to address this need. With the new LTS initiative, led by CA Technologies, IBM, EclipseSource and SAP AG, the Foundation will provide the facilities and processes needed to create signed deployable updates for older versions of Eclipse. This should, in turn, enable a new ecosystem of companies and enterprises to share fixes and releases. The initiative will be open to all organisations with an interest in extending the productive life of Eclipse technologies.

Responsive web design (RWD) has been the focus for the jQuery Mobile developers as they put together the new version, jQuery Mobile 1.3.0, of the touch-optimised mobile web framework. The developers say that they had been faced with designers asking whether they should use RWD or jQuery Mobile – the answer is “both” say the jQuery Mobile developers, and with 1.3, they have set out to educate users by adding responsive documentation and demos to explain key concepts. They have also added responsive tables, panels and grids to make it easier to build responsive sites and applications.

Science

Like a lot of people, I awoke this morning to the news of the new Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Initiated by multibillionaires Art Levinson, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan and Yuri Milner, the Breakthrough Prize is intended to recognise “excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life.” Winners are awarded $3 million each and since this is a prize, they can spend this money in any way they wish. According to the website, this prize is “dedicated to advancing breakthrough research, celebrating scientists and generating excitement about the pursuit of science as a career.”

Wonderful — anything to give science a positive and prominent public profile. But unfortunately, this prize is flawed and seriously misguided and thus, I don’t think it will accomplish its stated goals.

Health/Nutrition

What if the agricultural revolution has already happened and we didn’t realize it? Essentially, that’s the idea in this report from the Guardian about a group of poverty-stricken Indian rice and potato farmers who harvested confirmed world-record yields of rice and potatoes. Best of all: They did it completely sans-GMOs or even chemicals of any kind.

Security

Hacks have been popping up all over the place recently. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, various news organizations. And off-shore oil rigs aren’t to be left out. According to the Houston Chronicle, more than one of the things have been “incapacitated” by malware that can be traced back to the Internet’s most common vices: pirated music and porn.

John Kiriakou stood in the ninth-floor banquet hall of the Hay-Adams hotel Thursday night and took in the spectacular view of the White House and the Washington Monument. He recalled briefing two presidents during his career with the CIA. “It’s ironic,” he said, spreading his arms as if to embrace the tableau. “This really is the reason I came to Washington 30 years ago in the first place.”

In the first study of its kind, researchers with the Defense Department have found that pilots of drone aircraft experience mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

The accords with foreign governments — which include Pakistan and Yemen — are a key element excluded from the Department of Justice (DoJ) “white paper.”

[...]

The expert told the Journal that the administration believes Congress would leak the information to the public, which could be extremely embarrassing to the U.S. and its foreign partners given the unpopularity of the drone program and the potentially shady details of the agreements.

Two ex-Blackwater Worldwide executives pled guilty to one count of “failing to make and maintain records related to firearms.” They were sentenced by a federal judge to three years probation, four months house arrest with stipulations and fined five thousand dollars.

Journalists routinely berate governments for maintaining secrecy about security matters. Some of them seek to penetrate that secrecy, despite the obvious risks to the lives of agents, and to the success of the operations in which they are involved, that ensue when security leaks occur. Wikileaks has been responsible for some notable examples.

[...]

The dark corners of the world of journalism are every bit as murky as those of the world of espionage. This should not come as a surprise. The activities of the two worlds are not unrelated. Even accepting, as I do, that Ben Zygier died by his own hand, I cannot help wondering how many other hands around the world are stained with his blood.

Please, please, do watch the video that starts about three and a half minutes in. Absolutely horrifying yet hilarious brief account of British complicity in torture and repression in Bahrain over sixty years.

Cablegate

A recent report from the U.S. Attorney General shows a real interest in seeing Wikileaks and other groups like them shut down. The report also suggests the U.S. government may be recruiting and using civilian hackers as an aide in catching cyber threats early on.

For over a year, in a soundproofed courtroom located in the confined wasteland of Fort Meade, the U.S. Army is prosecuting the most consequential and unprecedented leak trial of the digital age in secrecy and managed obscurity. A twenty-five year old whistleblower, Private First Class Bradley Manning is charged with indirectly aiding Al Qaeda for allegedly providing information to WikiLeaks, who published the information on the Internet. Prosecutors have recommended life in prison; but the presiding military judge has the authority to impose the death penalty.

Who does that elevating? Meet the Campaign to Fix the Debt, the billionaire-funded project that uses Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles as figureheads for a fearmongering campaign to convince Americans that the deficits the United States has run throughout its history have suddenly metastasized into “a cancer that will destroy this country from within.” It is the latest incarnation of Wall Street mogul Pete Peterson’s long campaign to get Congress and the White House to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.

The achievement gap between school districts in high-income neighborhoods and those in low-income ones is already more canyon than crack, and if $1.7 trillion in automatic sequestration cuts are allowed to go into effect on March 1, that gap could grow even wider.

Fashion in economics is fascinating. Now every financial pundit on the BBC and Sky has noticed that quantitive easing causes devaluation and inflation. Suddenly they have remembered that if you create a lot of something, it decreases its unit value.

The most telling line from PBS’s Frontline piece ‘The Untouchables,’ on the absence of criminal prosecutions for the large-scale bank lending fraud behind the financial crisis of 2008, came when the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Enforcement division, Lanny Breuer, voiced his concern that bringing criminal charges might cause thousands of bankers to lose their jobs. This came after voluminous evidence was provided that senior bankers, including former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were culpably aware the mortgage securitization businesses they were running were purchasing, packaging and re-selling trillions of dollars of mortgage loans that were never intended to be paid. It also came after it was known the economic calamity caused by corrupt bankers cost tens of millions of people around the globe their jobs, homes, life savings and all hope for a better future.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

In elite media, the way to make people know you’re mad about something is to express your disgust at the failure of both parties to “get something done.” What the “something” is doesn’t matter as much as your own conviction that the political parties have become hopelessly polarized, and that serious leaders are needed to find the Sensible Center.

Censorship

Consider this: About half a million people pay for digital subscriptions to The New York Times, one of the few newspapers that commands a paid following online. Meanwhile, Google News, which curates primarily free content, draws 1 billion different readers every week. That is over 4,000 times the online subscriber base of the Gray Lady.

Privacy

Alan F. Westin, a legal scholar who nearly half a century ago defined the modern right to privacy in the incipient computer age — a definition that anticipated the reach of Big Brother and helped circumscribe its limits — died on Monday in Saddle River, N.J. He was 83.

There are about 79 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide—and India’s government wants to hand its spy agency data on every one of them.

In late 2012, back when it was still officially known as Research in Motion, the company behind BlackBerry handsets worked with the Indian government to enable surveillance of Blackberry Messenger and Blackberry Internet Service emails. But now India’s authorities are complaining that they can only spy on communications sent between the estimated 1 million BlackBerry users in India—and they want a list of all BlackBerry handsets across the globe.

Item one: Matthew Duran, Katherine Olejnik, and Maddie Pfeiffer are still in solitary confinement at the SeaTac FDC. And Kim Gordon and Jenn Kaplan, the attorneys for Duran and Olejnik, say they still haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer about why. (In response to a request from The Stranger about the three, a spokesperson for the FDC replied: “Where inmates are housed within the confines of our facility is not public information.”)

The criminal enterprise known as Microsoft finds itself embarrassingly exposed in the courtroom, for the IRS belatedly (decades too late) targets the company in an effort to tackle massive tax evasions

A look at some of last week's patent news, with imperative responses that criticise corporate exploitation of patents for protectionism (excluding and/or driving away the competition using legal threats)

Vista 10 to bring new ways for spies (and other crackers) to remotely access people's computers and remotely modify the binary files on them (via Windows Update, which for most people cannot be disabled)